Will surge of older workers take jobs from young?

By: The Associated Press January 3, 2014Comments Off on Will surge of older workers take jobs from young?

He doesn’t buy the comparison of older workers to women entering the workforce and says others’ arguments on older workers expanding the economy don’t make sense when there are so many unemployed people. If there was a surplus of jobs, he said, there would be no problem with people working longer. But there isn’t.

“I can’t imagine how you could refute that. The older worker retires, the employer looks around and hires another worker,” he said. “It’s like refuting elementary arithmetic.”

Melissa Quercia, 35, a controller for a small information technology company in Phoenix, said she sees signs of the generational job battle all around her: jobs once taken by high schoolers now filled by seniors, college graduates who can’t find work anywhere, the resulting dearth of experience of younger applicants. She doesn’t see economists’ arguments playing out. Older people staying on the job aren’t spurring new jobs, because companies aren’t investing in creating new positions, she said.

“It’s really hard to retire right now, I understand that,” she said. “But if the younger generation doesn’t have a chance to get their foot in the door, then what?”

Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who edited a book on the subject for the National Bureau of Economic Research, said it’s a frustrating reality of his profession: That those things he knows as facts are disputed by the populace.

“If you polled the average American they probably would think the opposite,” he said. “There’s a lot of things economists say that people don’t get and this is just one of them.”